My Work – Ongoing Embroidery

We’ve been crazy busy with the end of the semester at my job lately, keeping me from my writing and my art. Now that the summer is coming and things are winding down at the Institute I work at however, I’ve had more time to pick up my embroidery and other projects. Since work on my apartment is also reaching a brief stopping point I thought this would be a great time to share some of my work with you all.

Embroidery is particularly important for me not only as a creative outlet, but also as a calming mechanism; I struggle with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and use my creativity to get out all my worries and focus on something soothing and beautiful. Repetition and organization is really helpful for GAD, so cross-stitch does the trick beautifully. As a result, I usually have about 4 or 5 projects going at once so I always have something inspiring to work on. At the moment I only have one finished piece in my home since I give a lot of work away, but I have pictures of my WIP as well. Read past the jump for photos and commentary on my work!

Crawling Hand, 2014, 5×7 inches

This project was finished while I was unemployed and was a lovely quick piece to add to my collection. I made several patterns a while back that were based on public-domain movie posters, including the fantastic Crawling Hand. This was the only pattern that made it all the way through to completion, and I think it came out great! This only uses 4 colors (3 if you don’t fill in the black) and is stitched on 18 count black aida. I mounted it using the stretcher method on a nice piece of cardboard, though I prefer using plexi or another more permanent material when I can get my hands on it. If you like this and want the pattern I’d be happy to share it with you since the original image is public domain.

This piece is so close to being done I can taste it; all it needs is the finishing touches on the lower birds and some flowers to either side. This pattern was taken from the great book Traditional Samplers by Sarah Don, which I highly recommend. You may need to convert her colors to DMC if you prefer, but that’s easy enough to do online. This was originally intended to be a Christmas gift for my mother, but it dragged out over a couple years. The tiny 28 count cloth combined with the highly repetitive border is just soul sucking, but I am glad to be almost finished with this family tree.

This one came from a kit (Janlynn’s Father Winter, which I can’t seem to find sold online anymore though I got it from Amazon) and has been ongoing for a few years. I tend to work on it around Christmas or whenever I feel festive. There isn’t really a rush to finish this one and I’m not a huge fan of kits, but it will probably wrap up sooner than later. Kit thread on 16 count aida.

This has been my main project lately, the notorious Epic Pokemon Pattern Gen I that I wrote about in my post on Eponases. I decided to take a crack at the pattern (found on the Sprite Stitch forums) myself and have LOVED working on it! So colorful and satisfying to see the Pokemon come out one by one. It uses a ridiculous amount of colors and a huge piece of 18 ct aida, so expect to plop down a decent amount of cash to start this one; its a good way to start your thread stash maybe! Here’s the pattern if you are interested. Also if you love embroidery and video-game nostalgia you should totally join Sprite Stitch.

This has been my most recent piece and is most similar to what I tend to work on – pixel art. While I occasionally draw up my own art, for the most part I make patterns of pixel art I find online that I think would translate well to embroidery. It’s pretty much a one to one thing since the tiny pixel boxes can equal one cross-stitch. Since most of the images are made and owned by online artists I use these patterns for my own personal use only which is a really important thing to keep in mind as a cross-stitcher. This piece is based on an image I found on Tumblr which I cannot for the life of me find the source of. At the moment you can’t even tell what it is, however, so I’m not going to worry about giving credit just yet. 18ct aida and about 30 colors or so

That’s everything I’ve got going now – at least in embroidery! Summer is a great time to pick up cross-stitch since it’s not as warm as knitting. Take some stitchery out in the park today and bliss out under a tree. You’ll thank me later!

Hope you are all also having a creative spurt with the nice weather and free-time of the summer months! In the meantime,